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Our View: Philosophical discussions matter Friday Sep 23, 2016 at 12:01 AM The case of a South Medford High School teacher who came under scrutiny by some parents over photographs of a Black Lives Matter poster and a T-chart on a white board in his classroom appears to be an object lesson in not jumping to conclusions. Paul Cynar, who teaches pre-law and social studies courses at South, was asked to take down the poster after some parents complained. He complied, but it's not really clear why he needed  to. The T chart, which some parents believed identified Republicans as "bad" and Democrats as "good," turned out not to be Cynar's opinion but the result of a student-led discussion of the foundations of civil government. A student of Cynar's took a picture of the poster — which actually appears to be a printout of the words Black Lives Matter on a standard letter-sized piece of paper. Cynar took the paper down when asked to do so. He isn't discussing the matter publicly, so we don't know what his motivation was. A statement from the school district said when a teacher posts "somewhat permanently, a statement of a political nature on a bulletin board, it may be deemed as an inappropriate expression of opinion and should not be posted unless all sides of the issue are posted." Just for the sake of argument, it's worth asking what would constitute another "side" of the statement that black lives matter. "Black lives don't matter?" "White lives matter?" Or, perhaps, "all lives matter," which is what those who object to the statement frequently declare. That sounds to us like the beginning of a valuable classroom discussion on current events. What does a statement like that really mean? What prompted the Black Lives Matter movement, and what does that say about race relations in America in 2016? We hope such a discussion took place. As for the T chart on the white board, it was created during a student-led discussion after the class read works by political philosophers John Locke and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, familiar to every student of political science. The discussion revolved around the philosophical question of whether humans are naturally selfish or altruistic, and how a society's laws might reflect its answer to that question. The assumption by some parents that the word "Republicans" appearing in the "bad" category and "Democratic" in the "good" category meant the teacher was indoctrinating impressionable minds with his own worldview turned out to be far from the reality. Is it human nature to assume the worst based on ambiguous evidence? That, too could be the start of a valuable class discussion.